Steven Spielberg (99 page)

But one would not want to change any details of Hanks’s superb comic performance. His physical and psychological coping reactions to the baffling intricacies of life inside his huge, alien environment are delightfully rendered. Alex McDowell’s masterful recreation of the maze-like terminal interior (a
fully-operational set created in a Palmdale, California, airport hangar
formerly
used for building airplanes) reinforces the Chaplinesque feeling Spielberg draws from Viktor’s plight, giving his interactions with objects and
architecture
the kind of incongruities the Tramp found in the factory in
Modern Times
. Reviewers who predictably objected to
The Terminal
’s extensive use of actual brand names in franchise stores miss the point of its accuracy in surrounding Viktor with a microcosm of modern American life in all of its corporatized homogeneity. In the best immigrant tradition (even though he doesn’t intend to stay in America), Viktor proves infinitely adaptable to his new environment, ingeniously finding ways of feeding himself, earning a
living
as an artist making a mural, and constructing a personalized living space. His attempts to learn English are absurdly hilarious (J. Hoberman wrote that the film aspires to be an “exercise in Beckett lite”), but they also show how quickly and believably he manages his new setting. Like
E.T., Close
Encounters
, The Color Purple, Amistad
, and other Spielberg films,
The Terminal
largely revolves around the theme of communication, a humanistic preoccupation that always draws from Spielberg’s most passionate concerns. Viktor’s
affinities
with his group of working-class American friends, who include African Americans, a Latino, and an elderly man from India, demonstrate the strength of the nation’s ethnic diversity. Although this populist aspect of the film was mocked by some hostile reviewers, it goes to the core of what the film is saying about the importance of reemphasizing American multicultural values in a time of jingoism and ethnic scapegoating.

Viktor may be a man without a country, at least temporarily, but Spielberg may also have felt that way many times himself during this period, when the country he loved had evolved so strangely into a hostile environment. The revelation of why Viktor has come to America is also a reaffirmation of what Spielberg values most about American culture. Viktor’s late father collected signatures of leading jazz artists seen in Art Kane’s celebrated
Esquire
photograph
“Harlem 1958” (the subject of the 1994 documentary film
A Great Day in Harlem
). Viktor aims to track down the last remaining signer, saxophonist Benny Golson, whom he finds still playing at a New York hotel at the age of seventy-five. No doubt “highly flattering to American culture,” as British reviewer Philip French somewhat skeptically observed, this “symbolic act of filial piety” identifies the best in American culture largely in its minority influence. Viktor’s homage to jazz also represents another Spielbergian tribute to fatherly heritage, with the African American Golson standing in as a
surrogate
cultural father figure.
The Terminal
looks back nostalgically (and with guarded hopefulness) to a time before America, as the Homeland Security official declares, became “closed.”

“
S
UPPOSE
some beings from another planet were to drop out of the sky suddenly and begin laying about them here!” Frank Wells remarked to his brother H. G. one day as they walked through the peaceful English
countryside
.
The author immediately thought of how, if that calamity were to occur, Englishmen would be in much the same position as colonial peoples: “Perhaps we had been talking of the discovery of Tasmania by the Europeans—a very frightful disaster for the native Tasmanians!” The conversation spurred Wells to write his 1898 novel
The War of the Worlds
, in which invaders from Mars lay waste to just such a placid English countryside and to much of London itself before being brought down by common Earthly bacteria.

“And before we judge of [the Martians] too harshly,” he wrote in the book, “we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

Though Wells’s own views were marred with vestiges of the same colonialist attitude toward “inferior races,” his vision of Earthlings besieged by alien invaders has proven a resilient metaphor for artists seeking to convey to their audiences what it is like for a people to be invaded. At the time of the Munich crisis that served as a warning of the coming of World War II, Orson Welles directed his notorious 1938 CBS Radio adaptation of Wells’s novel, relocated to New Jersey. Welles and writer Howard Koch panicked large segments of the American populace by adapting the novel in the form of a fast-paced news broadcast (Spielberg bought the original script Welles used in the broadcast, to go with his
Citizen Kane
sled). The 1953 Paramount film version of
The War of the Worlds
, produced by George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin, is also set in the United States and is one of the quintessential Cold War movies, drawing upon widespread fear of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Spielberg’s 2005 film version for Paramount, DreamWorks, and Amblin Entertainment,
War of the Worlds
, expands upon the fears Americans felt after their mainland was invaded for the first time since the War of 1812. In an analogy to Wells’s original didactic conception of the story, Spielberg’s film also puts Americans and other spectators in the vulnerable position of the Iraqi people whose land was invaded by the United States two years before the film’s release, as a misplaced act of retaliation for 9/11. “Is it the terrorists?” Rachel Ferrier (Dakota Fanning) asks her father, Ray (Tom Cruise), when the attacks begin. As A. O. Scott wrote in his
New York Times
review of this “nerve-rackingly apocalyptic” film, Ray is “perhaps too preoccupied to give the honest answer, which is: ‘Well, sort of, sweetheart. In a metaphorical sense, that is.’”

War of the Worlds
is Spielberg’s vision of a contemporary Hell on Earth. Like Welles’s radio program, and like
A.I.
, the film is set in New Jersey, the state where Spielberg spent part of his youth. Cruise plays a working-class divorced father, a longshoreman and crane operator whose rig resembles the buried alien tripods that come bursting out of the ground shortly after the story begins, rather than appearing from the sky as in the novel. Ray spends the
rest of the film on the run with his young daughter as they and their fellow countrymen flee the invaders in a relentless succession of ultraviolent scenes.
War of the Worlds
is a horrific vision of social breakdown, demonstrating how fragile even an advanced technological society can be. With its increasingly escalating mayhem, the film becomes a disturbing vision of helplessness, brutality, and mob violence. The requisite Spielbergian emphasis on a flawed father figure trying to keep his broken family together (the group also, for a time, includes a surly teenaged son) raises moral questions about how far an ordinary person would go to protect his loved ones. That Ray is forced to commit murder in defense of his daughter puts a grim new twist on a familiar Spielbergian theme.

David Koepp wrote the workmanlike but rather soulless shooting script (following an earlier writer on the project, Josh Friedman). Unlike in the earlier adaptations of the novel, the protagonist is not a journalist or a scientist but another example of what Spielberg once called his “Mr. Everyday Regular Fella.” A dismayingly irresponsible, scattered, and childish father who lives in chaotic messiness even before the invasion and is treated with utter contempt by his son (Justin Chatwin), Ray has a lot to overcome to fulfill his parental role, but he comes through with such alacrity that he seems almost like a superhero. Cruise’s trademark fierceness carries Ray through all the story’s physical and emotional demands, but the characterization remains thin. Focusing on a single small family unit is dramatically convenient but gives a sense of disproportion to their problems in relation to the global catastrophe, a mistake Spielberg did not make with
Schindler’s List
. “Millions of deaths [actually ‘a billion,’ according to Morgan Freeman’s narration] and incalculable property damage seem like pretty expensive family therapy,” wrote Scott, “but it’s heartening to know that even an alien invasion can provide an opportunity for learning and growth.”

War of the Worlds
is never anything less than a technical marvel, seamlessly blending large-scale physical effects with CGI to conjure up nightmare visions of endless destruction. Spielberg’s technical mastery is often breathtaking, as in the 360-degree tracking shot around Ray and his family as they race out of town in their minivan, a shot that echoes a similar camera movement in
The Sugarland Express
but at a much higher speed. But after a while all the virtuosity and mayhem become wearying, and the film, despite its breakneck pacing, plods along emotionally on a single dull note of terror and hysteria (Fanning has little to do but give bug-eyed looks and scream).
War of the Worlds
has little subtlety or complexity, reducing everything to what Spielberg called the “primal” level. As he said, the film “preyed on our fears and vulnerabilities, the idea of terrorism, which is still pretty foreign and alien to the American psyche of feeling protected.” Ultimately this is an ugly film, visually and emotionally, an overwrought, outlandish, mechanical piece of work with a dismal view of humanity as a species barely worthy of saving.

War of the Worlds
bears an odd resemblance to an earlier, critically reviled Spielberg film,
1941
. Both are grandiose exercises in mayhem and destruction,
technically expert but emotionally stunted. Both show ordinary people reacting largely like hysterical idiots to an unexpected attack on the American mainland. The difference is that in
1941
, Spielberg is spraying his characters with mockery. Although most of his attempts at levity in that earlier film are leaden, there’s such sheer joy in his wanton destruction that it keeps the film mildly diverting. Sitting through
War of the Worlds
, on the other hand, is simply an ordeal, one that makes the viewer feel harassed, beaten down, and exhausted. Spielberg’s attempt to blend a “serious” evocation of post-9/11 fears with what is, at root, a cheap-thrills horror film approach never finds the requisite balance of visual and dramatic elements to support its weightier intentions.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago
Sun-Times
, who found the alien invasion lacking in logic and the tripods a “clumsy retro design,” described
War of the Worlds
as “a big, clunky movie containing some sensational sights but lacking the zest and joyous energy we expect from Steven Spielberg…. What happened to the sense of wonder Spielberg celebrated in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, and the dazzling imagination of
Minority Report
?” In a sense,
War of the Worlds
marked Spielberg’s regression to his youthful view of aliens, one that was heavily influenced by 1950s sci-fi/horror movies. Before he became celebrated for his refreshingly benign view of aliens in
Close Encounters
and
E.T.
, Spielberg had shown hostile aliens attacking humans in his little-seen first feature,
Firelight
(1964), and he had flirted with doing the same in his unfilmed project
Night Skies
before reconfiguring it as
E.T. War of the Worlds
producer Kathleen Kennedy claimed that “the edgier, darker story has always kind of been somewhere in there, and now he’s telling that story.” While discussing the film in a 2007 interview, Spielberg claimed, “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what a hypocrite—I’ve been making these movies declaring that I’m kinda like the ambassador of goodwill between them and us, and I started out my whole life making a movie about aggressive aliens.’” Perhaps the truth is that it bothered him to change course again so late in his career and wallow in the prevailing xenophobia of the Bush era. There’s no getting away from the fact that the humane qualities Spielberg brought to interplanetary encounters in
Close Encounters
and
E.T.
are sorely missed in the coldly formulaic
War of the Worlds
.

Nevertheless, because of Cruise and its nonstop action, and no doubt because it tapped so viscerally into the Zeitgeist,
War of the Worlds
became a box-office hit, grossing $591.7 million worldwide. Spielberg’s viability as a popular filmmaker had been thrown into question by
The Terminal
’s
lackluster
performance in the United States ($77 million), although the film did almost twice that business overseas. His resounding success with
War of the Worlds
enabled the fifty-nine-year-old director to continue reigning as Hollywood’s most crowd-pleasing filmmaker, canceling out the aura of disappointment that unfairly surrounded such superior films as
Amistad
and
A.I.
 

B
EING
able to make a film such as
Munich
, which confronts the audience with difficult, if not intractable, moral questions, is one of the major reasons Spielberg values his
commercial
success and jealously guards his independence. He fully anticipated the firestorm of animosity the film provoked. Before committing to direct it, he repeatedly turned down the project, which had been developed by producer Barry Mendel and brought to him by Kathleen Kennedy. He said, “I'll leave it to somebody else, somebody braver than me.” But he has earned the ability to speak his mind on subjects that concern him and to delve into controversial themes as he sees fit. His willingness to risk his capital of audience goodwill and critical approval is one of his most admirable traits.

“I couldn't live with myself being silent for the sake of maintaining my popularity,” he concluded. “And I'm at an age right now where if I don't take risks, I lose respect for myself. And this was an important risk for me to take. … I just could feel that somehow this story had my name written all over it and I couldn't deny that. It just stirred up all these questions and arguments inside me.” “Steven knew he was putting his head above the parapet,” cast member Ciarán Hinds commented. “He must have been aware what that might cost him personally. It's as brave as you can get—because he absolutely doesn't need to.” Though
Munich
(2005) does not reach the sustained level of
artistic achievement achieved by
Schindler's List
, it approaches the themes of terrorism and retribution responsibly and respects the moral complexity of the subject, even while presenting the material in the framework of a political thriller.

Spielberg remembered watching with horror (in the company of his father) the televised coverage of the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. (That event, depicted in
Munich
with television footage and fragmentary recreations, is covered fully in Arthur Cohn and Kevin Macdonald's 1999 Oscar-winning documentary
One Day in September
.) At the time of the massacre, Spielberg had never heard of terrorism, but felt “rage and frustration” over “Jews being murdered on German soil again.” Over time, his growing interest in world politics and involvement in Jewish causes would make him a passionate supporter of Israel. His involvement in
Schindler's List
and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation from the 1990s onward brought him in frequent demand for public commentary on Middle Eastern political issues. His liberalism made him skeptical of the more hardline approaches of the Israeli right to the issue of Palestinian independence. It is a bitter irony that making
Munich
would cause Spielberg to be denounced by some writers as an enemy of Israel, when the film was actually made out of his deeply felt involvement with Israel. “If it became necessary,” he told the German magazine
Der Spiegel
, “I would be prepared to die for the USA and for Israel.” The
Munich
project enabled him to explore his conflicts and concerns about Israel's troubled role in the Middle East and over the issue of how a nation should respond to terrorist attacks.

Israel's targeted assassinations of those responsible for the Munich massacre, and others it linked (sometimes tenuously) to terrorism, began as a secretive program, authorizing one or more hit squads to roam Europe for years, hunting down targets. Eventually the program became public knowledge, although its details remain shadowy and controversial. It is no coincidence that
Munich
was made at a time when the United States was grappling with similar issues: Is a nation justified in breaking international law when it believes its survival is at risk? Are targeted assassinations morally wrong? What does vengeance do to a nation and to a person's soul? And where does the ultimate responsibility lie for political violence? In the screenplay for
Munich
by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen) defines the essential moral dilemma when she asserts, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.”

Munich
's subtext is the American response to 9/11. The film implicitly questions the Bush administration's response as both excessive and damaging to the country's moral standing in the eyes of the world as well as a
provocation
of further turmoil in the Middle East. The surprising presence of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as Avner (Eric Bana), the leader of the hit squad, exits the film's final shot brings the subtext to the surface and asks the audience to consider whether the “eye for an eye” mentality is wise, destructive, or even efficacious. “Did we accomplish anything at all? Every
man we kill has been replaced by worse…. There's no peace at the end of this, no matter what you believe,” Avner tells Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), his Mossad superior in Operation Wrath of God. Through that far-reaching conclusion and with its many other moral ambiguities, the film raises questions it is not able to answer. For some critics, that is a flaw, but a work of art, even one that deals with such hot-button political issues, exists precisely to make the audience think and feel more deeply about its subject matter, leaving the solutions for political pundits, historians, and philosophers.

M
UNICH
is based on a 1984 book by the Hungarian-born Canadian journalist George Jonas,
Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team
. Although presented as a factual account, the book is based largely on the recollections of a source with the pseudonym “Avner.” Jonas claims he verified many of the details in Avner's account, but it has to be taken largely on faith. Israel has maintained official secrecy on the subject, but two Israeli generals publicly confirmed the existence of such hit squads, and Aaron J. Klein, a captain in the Intelligence division of the Israel Defense Forces as well as a writer for
Time
, provided a variant account of the reprisal killings in his 2005 book
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response
. Klein contended that those killed by the Mossad's Caesarea unit were not the hard-to-target top-level leaders of Black September but “low-level, easily accessible activists…. Yet they were profiled in ways that implied direct culpability,” which satisfied Israel's desire for revenge and caused fewer problems with European nations. Avner has been identified as Juval Aviv, now a writer and security consultant, but his identity and his story have been called into question by the Israeli government and others. “Can such tales be believed?” Jonas wrote in 2006. “I think so, though always keeping in mind many spooks possess the imagination of the Baron Munchausen….
Fact-checking
clandestine operations is virtually a contradiction in terms—if a government agency reveals anything about a covert operation, it's likely to be disinformation…. I'm satisifed that ‘Avner' described a string of operations of which he had first-hand knowledge. Whether or not he exaggerated his own role, I couldn't say.”

Spielberg's reliance on this text, like his use of Frank Abagnale's
questionable
memoir for
Catch Me If You Can, places Munich
in the realm of speculative docudrama (“INSPIRED BY REAL EVENTS,” as an opening title puts it). And when the director turned to Kushner, best known for his play
Angels in America
and an outspoken critic of Israeli policies, as the final screenwriter for
Munich
, that decision helped position the film to the left in the
philosophical
debate over Israel's relationship with the Palestinians while ensuring that
Munich
would take a vigorously dialectical approach in its dialogue. In a 2004 interview with the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
, Kushner called the founding of Israel a “mistake,” though he supported its right to exist: “Zionism aimed at the establishment of a national identity is predicated on a reading of Jewish
history and an interpretation of the meaning of Jewish history that I don't share. Insofar as Zionism is an idea that the solution to the suffering of the Jewish people was the establishment of a Jewish nation, I think it is not the right answer. I don't think that a minority group has a lot of hope in surviving entirely on the basis of its own force and power, because by definition a minority is outnumbered substantially…. Establishing a state means fucking people over.”

The central dramatic and philosophical thrust of
Munich
is that the coldblooded acts of vengeance committed by Avner cause him second thoughts and, eventually, moral anguish, making him doubt the righteousness of his cause and turning him against his own country. Such qualms are also expressed by another member of his team, the bomb maker, Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), who says, “We're Jews, Avner. Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong.” Avner says, “We can't afford to be that decent anymore.” Robert responds, “I don't know that we ever
were
that decent. Suffering thousands of years of hatred doesn't make you decent. But we're supposed to be righteous. That's a beautiful thing. That's Jewish. That's what I knew. That's what I was taught. And now I'm losing it. And I lose that … that's everything. That's my soul.” Avner finally emigrates to the United States, believing that the Israeli government is a threat to himself and his family because of his questioning and defiance of official policy. An earlier adaptation of Jonas's book, the 1986 HBO miniseries
Sword of Gideon
, which attracted far less critical scrutiny, also depicts Avner (played by Steven Bauer) as conflicted over his role, though he appears less distraught and frantic than the character in
Munich
and in the end rejoins the Israeli military to serve in combat.

Spielberg and Kushner met with Juval Aviv for many hours of discussion while preparing the film. Insisting that the character's conflicts in the film are based on reality, Spielberg also said, “I trust my intuition and my common sense: the man is not lying, he is not exaggerating. Everything he says is true.” Jonas contended that “Avner” may have “told the left-leaning
movie-makers
what they wanted to hear.” The author and others objected strenuously to
Munich
's emphasis on Avner's moral qualms, as if that violated a taboo against challenging Israel's right to defend itself against terrorism and even called into question its right to exist. “With due respect to pop culture and its undisputed master,” wrote Jonas, “one doesn't reach the moral high ground by being neutral between good and evil.”

Another of the film's most vociferous detractors was Leon Wieseltier of
The New Republic
, whose contempt for Spielberg had earlier been expressed in an article on
Schindler's List
entitled “Close Encounters of the Nazi Kind,” in which he wrote, “No figure in American culture has worked harder to stupefy it, to stuff it with illusion, to deny the reality of evil, to blur the distinctions between fantasy and fact.” Wieseltier wrote that there are “two kinds of Israelis in
Munich:
cruel Israelis with remorse and cruel Israelis without remorse.” Wieseltier argued that “for all its vanity about its own courage, the film is afraid of itself. It is soaked in the sweat of its idea of evenhandedness. Palestinians 
murder, Israelis murder. Palestinians show evidence of a conscience, Israelis show evidence of a conscience…. Palestinians kill innocents, Israelis kill innocents. All these analogies begin to look ominously like the sin of equivalence….
Munich
prefers a discussion of counterterrorism to a discussion of terrorism; or it thinks that they are the same discussion. This is an opinion that only people who are not responsible for the safety of other people can hold.”

J. J. Goldberg, the editor of the newspaper
The Jewish Daily Forward
, defended the film: “The debate as it unfolds on screen is an Israeli disputation, framed almost entirely in the words and deeds of Israelis…. What's important about
Munich
is that it portrays one of the essential truths of Israeli society. Whatever went on among the agents chasing down the Munich terrorists in 1972 and 1973, the fact is that Israelis do debate the rightness of their actions. They do so endlessly, and they have done it for years…. It is one of the noblest aspects of the reborn Jewish state. Friends of Israel everywhere should be proud to see that moral sensitivity portrayed on the big screen…. Killing corrodes the soul, even when it's necessary. Israelis know that. If their friends have forgotten it, then it's time to be alarmed.”

Michelle Goldberg of
Salon
put the argument in a wider political context: “Spielberg, ironically, is accused of being insufficiently Manichean…. The analogy to our own time is obvious, and in some ways the argument about
Munich
is really one about America. Post-9/11 political correctness, which demands that stories about terrorism and counterterrorism be limned in starkest black and white, seemed to have dissipated these last few years. In the debate over Spielberg's movie, though, it's returning with a vengeance. The result is not just the mischaracterization of a movie; it's the resurrection of the taboo against depicting the war on terror in shades of gray.”

The film's emphasis on the moral ambiguities of the situation does leave open the question of whether Israel's policy of retaliatory violence (which has continued in recent years) is justifiable or, indeed, efficacious. But Spielberg violated Stanley Kubrick's advice never to offer the media a definitive statement of his thematic intent, telling
Time
, “I'm always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it's threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine. There's been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end? How can it end?”
Munich
also makes a gesture at evenhandedness by giving Avner an exchange with a young member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Ali (Omar Metwally), who, thinking Avner is a member of the German Red Army Faction, makes the case for his own people's right to their homeland: “We can wait forever. And if we need to, we can make the whole planet unsafe for Jews…. [T]hen the world will see how they've made us into animals…. It will take a hundred years, but we'll win…. You don't know what it is not to have a home…. We want to be nations. Home is everything.” But the accusation by Wieseltier that
Munich
commits “the sin of equivalence” by drawing no distinction between the
Black September terrorists and the Israeli hit squad is simplistic and misleading (the dramatic emphasis is largely on the Israelis and their complex moral debate over the issues of violence), and there is nothing in the film to indicate that the filmmaker is anti-Zionist. The film's attempts at political balance are, at most, mild, even if they outraged some neocons and other commentators.
Munich
's
chutzpah
is that it devotes itself to examining the gray areas of the subject.